their country, right glad I was that I had thus offered my slight tribute
to the valour of the United States Army. For from the Pacific to the
Atlantic I met with a hospitality and a kindness that no other land could
excel and few could equal. And ever since then, I have felt deep in debt to
all Americans and have tried in many parts of our Empire to repay to those
who serve under the Star Spangled Banner a little of what I owe to their
fellow-countrymen.

Only those who have experienced that sympathetic American kindness can
realise what it is. It is all that gives me courage to face the reading
public as a writer of fiction and attempt to depict to it the fascinating
world of an Indian jungle, the weird beasts that people it, and the
stranger humans that battle with them in it. The magic pen of a Kipling
alone could do justice to that wonderful realm of mountain and forest that
is called the Terai--that fantastic region of woodland that stretches for
hundreds of miles along the foot of the Himalayas, that harbours in its dim
recesses the monsters of the animal kingdom, quaint survivals of a vanished
race--the rhinoceros, the elephant, the bison, and the hamadryad, that
great and terrible snake which can, and does, pursue and overtake a mounted
man, and which with a touch of its poisoned fang can slay the most powerful
brute. The huge Himalayan bear roams under the giant trees, feeding on
fruit and honey, yet ready to shatter unprovoked the skull of a poor
woodcutter. Those savage striped and spotted cats, the tiger and the
panther, steal through it on velvet paw and take toll of its harmless
denizens.

But, if I cannot describe it as I would, at least I have lived the life of
the wild in the spacious realm of the Terai. I would that I had the power
to make others feel what I have felt, the thrill that comes when facing the
onrush of the bloodthirstiest of all fierce brutes, a rogue elephant, or